The shelter Iskren gave them sat on a warm limestone shelf ten yards above the lowest hot spring, where a natural flue in the rock carried the heat of the water under the rush-matted floor.
First Ysabet took the half-covered wooden box out of her pack and set it by the warm hearth-stone with a shallow saucer of water and a handful of toasted barley groats. The original rescued field mouse climbed out onto the rim—still favoring its stiff left hind leg with the old dried scar across its flank—drank three long sips, and began stuffing groats into its cheeks with brisk, businesslike indifference to twenty miles of mountain flight.
Pip lay flat on an old wool horse-blanket beside the box, too spent even to curl around the mouse.
In the yellow light of the reed-oil lamp, the creature looked smaller than it had since the orchard. The loose folds along its back hung slack and empty over its ribs; the translucent shelter shell had softened until the edges sagged over its flanks like wet parchment, and along the old Little Harbor seam a two-inch crack had begun to weep clear mineral lymph. Worse, every time someone walked past the rush curtain outside, the faint quartz-cave lights inside Pip’s chest jumped and flickered, draining another trickle of lime from its starving plates.
